


Moon Lights Up the Night

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, First Kiss, Fluff, Halloween, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-26 00:01:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18271748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: During the long period of her recovery, Raven lost contact with most of her old friends—a polite way of saying that she pushed them away—and in an effort to be social, she starts frequenting the monster café.Octavia Blake, the proprietor of the café, is not a monster of any sort herself. To an untrained eye, she might almost be mistaken for a vampire, but real creatures know better. She is a former Goth, perhaps, but undoubtedly human.*Written for the Chopped Challenge on tumblr (round 1). Third place winner for use of the fluff theme.





	Moon Lights Up the Night

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the first round of The 100 Chopped Challenge: to write a fluff fic with the following tropes: a mythical creature; a coffee shop; one character teaching the other to do something (physical contact required); and a kiss in the rain.
> 
> Recommended listening: The Cramps' version of Fever (from which the title also derives.)

Before the attack, Raven was a long-distance runner. She'd train on the weekends, compete in two or three marathons a year—always pushing herself to be faster, stronger, tougher, to force down weakness, to beat her old records, to win.   


For a while, even after, she told herself that nothing had changed and she kept going.   


But by now the monthly transformations have taken their toll.    


She has found her routine, at least: on the evening of the full moon, she locks herself up in her basement, lies down on the mattress from an old futon that her other self has already clawed almost to bits, and waits for the cracking and reformation of her bones, the sprouting of fur, the creation of paws. Then she wearies herself howling and barking and raging at the moon, when it rises into view through the one window, on which she has welded a set of unbreakable steel bars.   


And she waits out the dawn, when she falls asleep to treacherous dreams, and wakes up whole.   


These constant reformations of her physical  self have left wounds that don't go away when the moon wanes: weary joints, perpetual soreness, odd marks on her skin. Her left knee is completely shot, and most days she wears a brace of her own design to help keep it steady, so she can walk without pain. All of this, even the brace, even the visible scars, even the slow and careful way she must treat her own body, she has come to accept. Slowly, and for the most part, sometimes unsteadily.   


During the long period of her recovery, she lost contact with most of her old friends—a polite way of saying that she pushed them away—and in an effort to be social, to allow herself to pretend that she is social, and also because now that she can no longer run, her weekends have become boring and too long, she starts frequenting the monster café.   


Not its real name, of course. Just what she calls it in her head, because its clientele are mostly freaks and weirdos of the supernatural sort, like herself: Goth vampires who wear vials of blood as necklaces and order cranberry muffins and Bloody  Marys before noon; faeries, dressed all in bright colors, amusing themselves by causing their berry smoothies to glow; sirens who always pick the biggest tables, because they know when they start humming along to the radio, new friends will inevitably join them; nymphs who show up with flower crowns and flowing strands of ribbon in their hair, and order large salads, which they pick at slowly while they sit by the window and watch the foot traffic passing by on the street.   


Octavia Blake, the proprietor of the monster café, is not a monster of any sort herself. To an untrained eye, she might almost be mistaken for a vampire, because she wears mostly dark colors, has dyed her hair a shade of brown so deep that it borders on black, and sports an intricate tattoo that curls around her shoulder and snakes down her right arm. But real creatures know better. She is a former Goth, perhaps, but undoubtedly human.   


Why she wants to surround herself with the inhuman, Raven doesn't know. Sick fascination, perhaps. Or a sick feeling of kinship. She seems to have no kin of the traditional sort.   


Raven knows this because, two weeks before Christmas, her first after the attack, she asked Octavia in passing if she was going to visit her family for the holidays. Octavia twisted her mouth into a disgusted frown and shook her head. "No," she answered, and handed Raven back her change.   


"Not a fan of them?" Raven asked, returning the bills to the tip jar, gaze steady on Octavia's face.   


"Let's just say that they're not fans of me.” Then, although she'd already asked, although the question coming then would be coming much too late, "Will that be all?"   


Not exactly an opening for further questions. By the next week, though, when the café had all but emptied out and Raven was still coming by, Octavia had recovered enough to turn the question back on her.    


"So I see you're sticking around?"   


" Mmm ," she answered, a slight hum and a nod, as she wrapped her palms around her large latte mug. "Yeah, I—don't have anywhere to go. Not that—it's fine."   


"Yeah,” Octavia echoed, “it's fine.”   


Outside, a gentle snow falling down, and inside, the lightest strains of Christmas music piped in from a great distance, another realm perhaps, and only two other customers huddled into opposite corners of the room. Octavia had strung large paper snowflakes in front of the windows. They wavered slightly in the blast of warm air from the heating vents.   


"It's just that my mom is dead," Raven explained, sudden and sharp into the silence. To her credit, Octavia did not recoil. "And I never knew my dad. So."   


"Me neither." Her words darted out, quick, like a snake's tongue. Raven's palms burned from the heat of the mug. In the winter, bundled up against the cold, all of her scars hidden, she looked almost normal, almost as normal as Octavia, standing completely still and staring out beyond Raven's shoulder as if staring back into the past itself. "And—I rebelled a bit. A lot, when I was younger. Burned some bridges with my mom and my brother. So." A smile, forced and ironic. "Happy holidays, I guess."   


Raven laughed, a noise just as bitter. "Yeah, happy holidays to us."   


She considered coming over on Christmas, or Christmas Eve perhaps, just to see if the café was open. But the snow was coming down hard by then, and the roads were icy, and she was sure that the place was locked up and empty, anyway.   


*   


Most of Octavia's patrons are regulars, like Raven, so she never puts on a false, cheery face for them. She'll joke, she'll tease, she'll laugh; with some, she is even obscene. But she never pretends that she's having a good day when she isn't. "Good thing she doesn't have powers," a witch at the next table over murmurs to Raven, one Saturday in spring, when they hear a loud crash from the kitchen. "Or she'd blow the whole place up."   


_Good thing I can't blow things up_ , Raven thinks,  or I'd blow  everything up.   


Octavia's honesty allows Raven to be honest, which is a relief, because at work she is always putting on a brave face. At the café, she feels comfortable letting people see her pain, even when that pain makes her angry, even when it's  mean and ugly and sharp. Octavia listens to her rants with patience, as she wipes down nearby tabletops or sweeps the floor around Raven's feet.   


"I should start charging by the hour for these therapy sessions," she jokes, once, and Raven rolls her eyes.   


"Like I don't pay enough for these overpriced lattes," she answers, and Octavia swats at her foot with the broom.   


*   


Springs eases into summer, and then, time itself seems to stall. They sleepwalk through a warm September, barely noticing that August has fallen away and then—a quick flick of the calendar page—somehow it is October and still t-shirt weather, the vampires sweating in their dark black clothes. Halloween approaches, and Octavia decorates the café for the holiday. She picks a spider theme this year: drapes the bakery display case with fluffy cobweb gauze; hangs giant spiders with long, fuzzy, bendable legs from the ceiling; sets some of them crawling across the window so they can be seen from the street. She draws little carton spiders on the cardboard holders of her to-go cups.   


Outside, the air is warm but dry. The ground cracks and splinters from a long draught, and the leaves, barely turned, fall in bursts when the wind blows, and litter the sidewalks with crunchy, withered husks.   


Raven's usual spot, a table for one directly across from the cash register, has been taken over by a large, plush spider with googly eyes. She moves it to a new home on top of the potbelly stove, which sits in the corner and is purely decorative, but positions it so that it can stare over her shoulder at her work. She orders her latte with a double shot of espresso, nothing to eat, because she's hungry but she cares more about the file she stole from the office, cares more about making up for the time she'll lose to the next full moon than about the time-consuming and complex process of eating, of choosing what to eat and then consuming, and consuming, and consuming, as she always wants to do at the three-quarter moon.   


She and the spider are making good progress when a shadow blocks the stream of sun from the window, and someone sets a plate down on the edge of the table with a quiet, but noticeable, clink. Raven looks up. Octavia steps to the side so that she is no longer a shadow, features hidden by the flare of light behind her, and meets Raven's gaze with a smile. She has one hand behind her back, an eminently suspicious expression on her face.   


"Favor," she says and points to the dish. At the center is a large cut of salmon, covered in some inscrutable, unknown sauce, surrounded on three sides by a ring of vegetables and on the fourth by a heaping mound of brown rice. It smells delicious. Raven's fingers clench briefly around her pencil, and her mouth waters.   


"I need you to give me your opinion on this," Octavia says, just as Raven manages:   


"I didn't order this."   


Octavia narrows her eyes, a thin, judgmental look, as if Raven were slow. "I know," she answers. "That's why I said 'favor.' I'm thinking of making it next week's dinner special but I'm not sure and I need your opinion."   


Raven sets down her pencil, picks up her fork instead, but hesitates, the tines poised over a tantalizing broccoli floret. "Do you always have taste testers for your dinner specials?" she asks. “Because you know I’m probably not your best bet. The faeries have a much more acute sense of—”   


“The faeries are even more judgmental than you,” Octavia answers curtly. “My ego doesn’t need that kind of bruising. Now stop asking so many questions and consider—this,” she draws out the word, pulling her hand from behind her back with a flourish, and revealing a single muffin on a small, round plate, “distracting bribe.”   


The muffin appears to be banana nut, which is Raven's favorite. Now her fork isn't sure where to go, and her stomach is rumbling so loudly that she can barely think through the sound.   


"Are you trying to bribe me into accepting free food by offering me yet more free food?" she asks. "This isn't a fiscally sound idea, you know."   


Octavia waves her hand, a breezy dismissal that hides, Raven thinks, an undercurrent of nerves. "I'll make it up in all those over-priced coffees you're ordering. Now seriously, try it." And when Raven hesitates again, she adds, "Is it because it's fish? I thought that might be a problem—"   


"No." Raven can feel her own expression softening, as she looks up at Octavia, watches the crest and fall of her own nerves as her breath catches, and she inhales, and slowly exhales again. "No, I like fish." Her voice drops, wistful but not quite sad. "I've always liked fish."   


Even if now she's much more likely to tear into meat like some kind of animal, as if part of her is always an animal now, even in her human form.   


She tears off a corner of the salmon with her fork and tries it tentatively, too aware of Octavia's watchful eyes just above her.   


It tastes just as perfect as it smelled, perhaps more so, and suddenly she doesn't care at all about her files or her calculations, or the biggest engineering project her firm has taken on in years, because she's starving, she is ravenous, she needs to eat this—she needs to eat everything.   


"Slow down a little there," Octavia says, laughing, pleased, and lets her hand rest on Raven's shoulder, gently nudging her upright again. She'd been leaning in over her plate, shoveling food into her mouth. Realizing this is embarrassing, but only slightly so. She wipes at her mouth with a napkin, wraps her arm around her stomach as she catches her breath.   


"Knew you were hungry," Octavia murmurs.   


Raven smiles, a bubble of laughter building up inside her, too. "Let me guess," she says. "First one's free, and for the second serving, I pay an arm and a leg."   


Octavia grins back, devious, almost wicked. "Oh no," she says, one eyebrow quirking up, “my evil master plan has been discovered.”   


*   


Two experimental dishes, three coffees, a muffin, and a slice of pie later, Raven piles her empty dishes on top of the trash bin, and notices a poster pinned to the wall next to the window. An additional stack of flyers is sitting on the table next to the trash. She picks one off the top and returns to the cash register, moved by a great urgency not even she can explain.   


"You're having a dance?" she asks, slapping the piece of paper down on the countertop. The question comes off more demanding than simply mildly curious, which was truly the emotion she was going for. "Here?"   


"Yes," Octavia answers, and points to the date and time on the sheet. "On Halloween. Why?" She grins, small and sly, and leans forward over the counter, almost into Raven's space. (Raven tells herself not to think about Octavia's hand on her shoulder, the first significant contact between them, which seems to echo with a significance far greater than it held at the time—) "Are you going to go?"   


"Ah—"   


"Or are you busy?"   


Raven hesitates. She is not busy. Halloween is in a few days, the full moon a few days after that.    


"Don't you think the tables will get in the way?" she asks, instead.   


Octavia bends forward, crossing her arms against the countertop, her hair falling in sheets to either side of her face. She reaches up to tuck the strands of one side behind her ears, revealing two silver earrings and a shining silver cuff. "I hate to spoil the surprise,” she whispers, faking a conspiratorial tone, “but I'm actually thinking of moving the tables out of the way.” Then, abruptly, "You should come," in a voice just as casual, just as light, just as meaningful, somehow, as the memory of her hand on Raven's shoulder, the food brought to her table, the banana nut bribe.   


Raven blinks, trying to remember the last time she danced. Long before the attack, so long ago that the memory feels like the hazy imprint of another person's life, a past life or a dream.   


"I'll see," she says, but picks the flyer up anyway, and slides it neatly into her bag.   


She turns to go, pretending there is no flare of red to her cheeks, but then Octavia calls out to her—"Hey!"—and she pauses mid-step. Slowly turns. Raises her eyebrows.   


"You think it'll rain before then?" Octavia asks.   


Is that she was going to say, Raven wonders, or just the first small and useless words she found herself able to form, waiting there at the center of Raven's gaze, her courage failing?   


"I've no idea. Maybe."   


"Come on. You don't have a guess?"   


Raven sighs and crosses her arms against her chest. "Octavia," she answers, "I don't know what you've heard, but the ability to tell the future is not a traditional power of the werewolf."   


It's the first time she's said the w-word aloud, and the weight of the unsaid finally lifting, a weight she didn't know she carried now evaporated, now blissfully gone, makes her feel buoyant. Almost as if, like the witch stirring sugar into her tea, or the faerie in her teal blue dress, she  were capable of flying out the door.   


*   


The day before Halloween, the air thick with heat, humid and crackling with electricity as if charged by an incoming storm, Raven arrives at the café to find the lights on but the door locked, the doorknob rattling uselessly in her hand. Through the window, she can see that the space has already been transformed for the party, all of the tables pushed back against the walls and stacked, sometimes precariously, on top of each other, to create a large, open dancefloor in the center of the room. Octavia, in a short black dress and combat boots, her hair tied back in a high ponytail on top of her head, is taking advantage of it, twisting her hips to a beat Raven cannot hear, twirling her broom in circles as she sweeps.   


She doesn't notice Raven's attempts to turn the doorknob, but she does notice the rap of knuckles against the window pane. Raven feels a small thrill of satisfaction at making her jump. Another small thrill at the wide beam of her smile when she sees who is trying to get in.   


"I see that you're closed," Raven says, as Octavia opens the door.   


"And yet you're still here," Octavia answers, but she's grinning, stepping back and waving Raven in. "I locked up early to get ready for the party tomorrow. Kitchen's closed but I can offer you the mesmerizing spectacle of me sweeping the floor." She wiggles her eyebrows, barely keeping a straight face herself as Raven laughs.   


"I'll take it."   


Now that she's inside, the door closed once more against the heat, the early twilight, she can hear that Octavia is blasting Monster Mash through the café's sound system. She disappears briefly behind the counter to turn it down, then comes shimmying back into view, picking up her broom again and giving it a twirl. Raven leans against the wall by the door, watching her, not pretending she isn't enjoying every moment.    


Octavia mimes the twist, the mashed potato, then drops the broom and switches to the macarena, in a dizzying bit of time travel nonsense, before she gets fed up with Raven's wallflower routine. "Come on, come on, come on," she says, a little breathless, so quick the words slide and slur together, and takes Raven's hands to pull her forward. Raven digs her heels in, stubbornly holds back.   


"You cannot come into my establishment after closing, just to watch me wake a fool of myself, and not join in," Octavia argues. Two high spots of red brighten her cheeks. With her hair pulled back, Raven can see every lovely detail of her face.   


"I don't know how to—" she tries to argue, and Octavia abruptly releases her grip on Raven's fingers and sets her hands on her own hips instead.    


"Do not tell me that you don't know how to do the macarena. You were in the fifth grade once, weren't you?"   


"Yes, but that was—"   


"Shush."   


And she does. She wouldn't normally, but one of Octavia's fingers, the nail painted a deep blood red, is pressed against her lips. And the song is ending. And in its place, the steady, deep bass notes of a new song, which she recognizes as a cover of Fever, are thumping through the room, through her heart.   


"Let me teach you," Octavia says, low, what Raven thinks might be intended as a joke, but which is not at all funny, not at all. Not funny, because somehow, Octavia's hands have settled at her waist. She reaches her own arms up, drapes them over Octavia’s shoulder. The stuttered twirl of drumbeat before the chorus matches the stuttered rhythm of her lungs.   


"I'm pretty sure this isn't how the macarena starts," Raven murmurs. One of Octavia's hands has moved to her lower back. Her own fingers are sliding up into Octavia's hair. Curling, grasping, but still tentative, the movement incomplete.   


"It's a little-known variant, actually," Octavia whispers, with a tiny curl of a smile. She takes a step backward, and another, swaying just slightly to the beat, pulling Raven along into the middle of the room.   


"Oh."   


That is all she can manage: a gentle exhale of breath, like a sigh. But it seems like enough, with Octavia so close that she can take the measure of Raven's heartbeat, her shaky breaths, her careful fingers as they run along Octavia's shoulders, skim across her back, slip across the soft fabric of her dress. The creeping beat of the music encourages them to creep closer. At each sharp cry—Fever! strangled, desperate, willfully contained but gnawing—Octavia tugs her a bit closer, grabbing on to her hips with an echo of need. She guides Raven gently, creating the rhythm of her steps with the slightest slip of her palms or turn of her wrists. Sometimes her nose bumps up against Raven's nose, her cheek. Once, she dips her head down, and Raven can feel Octavia's breath against her neck, and she has to close her eyes, she feels too warm, she feels like she might never be able to let go.   


Octavia's nose trails, featherlight, up her neck.   


Raven's breath stutters. Her palm sliding to the back of Octavia's neck, maybe guiding her, maybe tracing her movements—Octavia's lips bumping up against her chin. The music slowing, and their own slow swaying now little more than a light shifting of weight from foot to foot. The song seems to come to them from a far-distance, fading, fading, Octavia's eyes closed and Raven's almost closed, an exhale of warm breath on her lips—   


When the song ends, only silence follows, and whatever spell it cast falls apart and untwines. They are left frozen and uncertain, unfairly wary of themselves. Octavia's eyes flicker open. She pulls back, and Raven drops her hands down to her sides and clears her throat. Octavia reaches up to fix her hair.   


"Maybe—" she says, and Raven:   


"I should—"   


_I should go._   


Outside, a distant rumble of thunder sounds, like a warning.   


"Yeah. Um." Octavia looks around, and she seems so heartbreakingly lost that Raven considers just taking her in her arms again. As if she could, as if she still knew how. "I can—I’ll just finish this up tomorrow. Let me just put a few things away and I'll walk you out."   


Raven agrees, numbly, quietly, and waits by the door until Octavia is ready. The thunder has not ceased. She notices lightning, too, through the window, cracking apart the sky in the distance.   


When Octavia is ready, Raven opens the door, Octavia just behind her, flicking off the light and locking up on her way out.    


"Storm's coming soon," Octavia notes, tilting her head back as she stands, just at the edge of the awning, sticking her hand out to check for the first spots of rain. She adds over her shoulder, "I don't need supernatural powers to figure that one out," and Raven smiles, thin.   


"Guess not."   


She supposes that she should feel angry with herself, for wasting an opportunity she may never find again. But mostly, she just feels sad.   


"Where'd you park?" Octavia asks.   


"All the way down the street and around the corner."   


"Okay. I'll walk you."   


As they cross the street, fat drops of rain start to splatter on the road around them. Only a few at first, but the rain quickly swells to a furious downpour as they speed walk, uselessly, toward the corner.   


"Just our luck," Octavia shouts. Raven can barely hear her over the torrent of rain, hissing and sizzling against the warm asphalt, banging loudly against the remaining leaves on the half-bare trees. Octavia has her arms crossed over her head, as if somehow this would help her to stay dry. She looks unaccountably adorable, and Raven's heart feels like it could burst in her chest.   


"You don't have to walk all the way out here with me," she yells back, although they're already turning the corner, her beat-up blue truck in sight, and she can hear Octavia laughing, almost manically, next to her, the sound caught up in the distant echoes of thunder.   


"I think it's a bit too late to turn back now!" she answers, and Raven finds it in herself to laugh a little, too.   


She's soaked straight through and hardly cares, anymore, about another minute, or five, or ten, in the rain. When she gets to her truck, she takes up a post outside the driver's side door, one hand on the door handle as if she might open it. But she has no intention of opening it. She only wants to stare at Octavia's face, not trying to hide her own longing, the last slow beats of the song still tapping out a rhythm in her head.   


Octavia lets her hands arms fall down to her sides again. She tries to wipe the water from her face, but the rain keeps on coming. The dry, parched earth takes it in. The hot, tense feeling of the air has broken: a cooler season now coming in.   


"Thanks for the dancing lesson," Raven yells, not knowing what else to say, knowing she should just open her door and climb inside and drive away—reaching instead for Octavia's hands and squeezing them tight.   


"Any time," Octavia answers. "Tomorrow—even."    


She squeezes Raven's hands back; she tugs her a step closer. Leans in, with only the slightest hesitation, and brushes a kiss against Raven’s cheek.    


Raven's heart beats frantically against her chest.   


She cannot stand this, cannot stand a moment more where she cannot hear her own thoughts, cannot think her own thoughts, cannot parse out her own need from what sparks and fizzes in the air between them. Octavia is uncertain on her feet, shifting her weight, pulling back perhaps as if she might go—"I should be going," she's saying, her voice too quiet, her words almost impossible to catch—such reluctance in them both to break their hold—   


"Not yet."   


Her voice, too, lost in the heavy shivering, splashing, sounds of the downpour.   


Octavia's hands have all but broken from her hands, but Raven snatches at her fingers.   


"What?"   


"Not yet, I said. Not—"   


She pulls her forward until they bump up against each other, chest to chest, until Raven's nose is squashed against Octavia's nose, until their lips have found each other at last. The kiss is frantic and messy and uncertain, clawing and fervid, thrumming with need. They break apart, catch their breaths. Try again. Raven traces the tips of her fingers against the rain-slick skin of Octavia's cheek. She trusts herself to be gentle, now, like she hasn't in a long time. The wildness in her is not tamed, may never be, but it's been channeled now, funneled into the press of lips against lips, mouth opening to mouth.   


Octavia's arms are wrapped around her, holding her safe and close.   


When they break apart, at last, Raven nods over her shoulder at her truck, and Octavia squeezes her hand once more time, then runs around to the passenger door. Inside, the rain sounds even louder, banging ceaselessly on the windshield and the roof above their heads, an undifferentiated blur of sound. It streaks past the windows, and the world turns watery and uncertain in its wake. They drip on the seat cushions, shiver in their soaked clothes, in their soaked skin. Raven finds that she is breathless, that she feels like she's been laughing, that her lungs hurt and that her hand has reached already for Octavia's hand.   


She rolls her head to one side, looks at her lazily, lovingly. "I don't think I can drive in this," she says.   


Octavia pulls their hands to her lips, kisses Raven's knuckles.   


"I think," she answers, "that I won't mind the wait."   


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> You can find a moodboard for this fic [here](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/183903166405/moon-lights-up-the-night-ravenoctavia-modern-au) and an epilogue/additional scene [here](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/184398826485/april-23-moon-epilogue), both on my tumblr, @kinetic-elaboration.


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